BlackBerry has a lot of catching up to do in order to stay relevant. To stay in the game, an upcoming device called the BlackBerry London is in the works and said to be running on the upcoming BBX OS.

Rumour suggests that the BlackBerry London runs on a TI OMAP dual-core 1.5GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and comes with 16GB of storage. There’s a 8MP at the back and a front facing 2MP for video calls. That’s well spec’ed like the rest of todays offering. In terms of design, the London looks similar to the recently launched premium BlackBerry Porsche design device.

According to the source, the BlackBerry London is thinner than the iPhone 4 and it is roughly the same size as a Samsung Galaxy S II. Because of its boxy design, the device is said to able to stand on its sides without toppling over.

There’s no official details yet but an update from BGR indicates that it will be released sometime in Q3 2012. That’s one year from now and the hardware specification would probably be mainstream or obsolete by then. Come on RIM, you could do better.

I am a strong Android user right now, but one thing I absolutely hate – HATE – about this platform is the battery power. What I'm looking forward to is a BBX based Blackberry that can get a decent set of basic apps going for it, and if the battery power is much improved, I'd much rather use it than to continue on with Android. It will be *very* hard for me to give up Google's features though, like Google Voice or Google Navigation. Android has a huge app base now, so BBX will have to be easy enough to port to for developers to send good apps its way.